From: fdc@news.columbia.edu (Frank da Cruz) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.kermit.misc Subject: Text-mode net access (was: [?] PPP and MS-DOS Kermit 3.14 PL 8) Date: 19 Oct 1995 11:34:03 -0400 Organization: Columbia University In article <4622ht$fik@globe.indirect.com>, Jim Monty wrote: : By the way, I'm curious: Am I the only schlemiel still trying to run : TCP/IP over a serial line under MS-DOS (not Windows) on a 20 Mhz 80386SX : PC with a 40 MB hard drive who can't find an Internet service provider : that can cope with anything besides Trumpet Winsock or Windows 95? : I hope not, but I'd be interested to hear responses from others on this topic. It has far-reaching implications, not only for us Kermit aficionados, but for the world at large. Here is one slightly pessimistic way of looking at it: Over its first twenty years, the net (first the ARPAnet, then the Internet) was an incredibly valuable tool for cooperation, collaboration, mutual help, research and development, standards generation, and innovation. "Content" was constantly being added to it -- software, all kinds of information, discussions of new ideas, etc. Most of this content came in the form of text: source code, prose, bibliographic information, messages, email, conferences, etc. Then, at some point in the recent past, the net became the Information Superhighway -- an object of commerce and mass consumerism. Which is not a bad thing: it's a kind of public recognition of all the hard work and deep thought that went into building the net and building up its vast resources of content. But at the same, the net became "easy to use". To grossly simplify what this means: one no longer actively accesses the net in "read/write" mode; rather, one passively points and clicks on things. Most of the modern net access software is designed to extract things from the net, rather than add things to it. It's as if the content had become frozen in time, except, of course, for all the commercial offerings. It's like a museum, in which everybody looks at the items on display and then stops at the gift shop on the way out and spends a pile of money. Soon, even the items on display will lose their attraction, and we will be left with nothing but an electronic shopping mall. There has been a lot of discussion in various fora (sorry, forums) to the effect that "text is dead". I, for one, would like to think calmer heads will prevail. NOTHING can replace text, because anything that you can think of depends on some particular interpreter that runs only on some specific operating-system/hardware-platform, and all of these items become obsolete with amazing speed in today's fast-paced marketplace. Take e-mail as an example. Why are we still stuck with a primitive 7-bit ASCII form of exchange? Because nothing else works. Everything else, at best, depends on viewers and interpreters that the recipient probably does not have because they are platform-dependent (MIME or no MIME), and at worst, doesn't even get delivered because of transparency problems. 200 years from now, if anybody happens to have carried this message forward across the many changes that will have occurred in storage media, nobody will have any trouble reading it. I don't think you can say the same for any other form of electronically stored information. Which brings us back to the original posting. Internet Service Providers should not be quite so quick to lock out people who wish to access the net text mode, because those are the very people who are most likely to keep adding content and value to the net (unless your definition of "value" happens to include surreptitiously scanned-in centerfold pictures :-) - Frank